The other day back home in Poland, my dad put on a recording of Le Nozze di Figaro, his favourite one. The one with Vienna Philharmonic, Erich Kleiber and a bunch of amazing singers. I had never heard this one before (shame on me, apparently everyone says it is THE recording of Le Nozze), and my attention was immediately caught by the voice of Susanna. I wonder if I listen to opera often enough to issue such criticism, but I’llRead More

On the couple of blogs I follow regularly, in the last two months before Christmas there happens a huge inundation, a mass attack of gift guide posts. It gets worse and worse every year. And I get more and more irritated, when I visit a website to look up some, ya know, apartment makeovers or fashion trends in New York (bear with me), and instead I get a gift guide post. And another. And another. And… Not only is itRead More

A friend invited me to join a community project. It is organised in a small town school near Brussels, the students of which are performing an opera written specially for them by a young composer. The school – I will clarify for my Polish readers, who might smile with disbelief – is a “normal” school, not a music one. My dear Polish readers, let’s take a moment to imagine executing a music-theatre performance with a complete amateur orchestra and choirRead More

Yesterday I was running errands with my boyfriend (some may think, seeing as I keep mentioning him, that writing about him is the raison d’être of this blog :-)) and one of our to-do items was visiting the maison communale, a sort of town hall in our district. The building itself is magnificent, constructed in the beginning of the 20th century in Neo-Renaissance style, with fancy staircases, sculptures and plenty of marble. The hall where we had to wait isRead More

Recently I thought it would be a good idea to read something in French, to improve my French. (Seems like a no-brainer.) I dug up Le rouge et le noir, which I read in Polish a long time ago and loved. I also left Le Père Goriot lying around, planning to read it next, and this one was immediately snatched by my boyfriend who is now sacrificing hours of precious sleep over it. So one evening we were doing thisRead More

I’m probably not the only girl who loves period dramas. Of course there is a sort of a romantic indulgence in immersing oneself in a story from the times long gone – the attire, the manor houses and palaces, the candlelit drawing rooms, horses instead of cars out on the streets, landscapes still unspoilt by the industrial revolution… Add to this the fact that during my adolescent years we had BBC Prime included in our TV subscription at home soRead More

Last week I was running errands with my boyfriend and we finally had a roll of film developed with his photos of our holiday trip last July. I’m looking at them now and thinking back to the lovely time we had – we went to the Alps, the whole trip lasted a week and during this week I did many things for the first time in my life! First of all – we hitchhiked. Okay – I had done itRead More

I have been blogging since I was 13 years old. Back then, in middle high school in Poland, it was t h e thing among teenagers (now all the teenagers moved to Tumblr and Instagram?). It was much easier than now: I would just write whatever came to my mind. It must have been an awful lot of bullshit, but at least I didn’t have the writer’s block I’m experiencing now, sweating over the first post here. I mean thisRead More